Marketers must embrace hyper-targeting, cross-platform campaigning and advanced analytics if they’re to succeed in the digital revolution, Facebook Australia’s head of insight claims.

The social media giant’s head of measurement and insights, Helen Crossley, told attendees at this year’s Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) Connect event in Sydney that the industry is living through a digital revolution comparable to the industrial age, where communication is about the “everyday and everywhere”.

To cope, Crossley identified three fundamental trends that marketers must come to grips with, while also championing Facebook’s contribution to each. At the top of the list was hyper-targeting, or the ability to communicate on a one-to-one basis with our target customers based on relevance and what matters to them.

“Marketers spend a lot on insight teams and working out their target customer and clustering them, but while these profiles have helped us identify the needle in the haystack, it’s not based on a real person,” she said. “Hyper-targeting means you need to change the way you communicate with consumers and engage with them in one-to-one relationships.

“As all media comes online, you can find your exact audience at scale. Most businesses and marketers in this country are not doing a good job of that yet.”

The second key trend Crossley identified was the age of cross-media platform marketing. She highlighted research which found 93 per cent of Facebook users are using the social media platform at the same time as watching TV.

As an example, Crossley pointed to Nestle Germany’s recent Maggi campaign where the brand engaged consumers through both TV and social by conducting a simultaneous and complementary campaign on both Facebook and TV. The campaign reached 30 million people including two million consumers purely through Facebook. Crossley claimed the Facebook paid media represented eight per cent of the total budget but 19 per cent of subsequent sales and recorded a URI that was 2.5 times greater than TV.

Marketers should take this a step further by conducting cross-platform campaigns that include mobile devices, Crossley said. “Mobile is the most intimate connected device that has ever existed,” she
added.

The third trend singled out by Crossley was the maturing of data analytics and exponential rise in data sources. Facebook is endeavouring to position itself as a key enabler in the behavioural data mix and has opened up partner categories in the US allowing one brand to rent another’s consumer data based on utilising similar customer characteristics and parameters.

This year’s ANNA Connect event was held at Doltone House Hyde Park on 23 May and also included a presentation on innovation from serial entrepreneur, Creel Price, along with a panel of CMOs from Lions, Subaru, Westpac and Ferrero Australia on the key issues of mobile, big data, content and leadership.

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